Re: [tied] About methodology...

----- Original Message -----

From: Glen Gordon

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, August 29, 2000 9:01 PM

Subject: Re: [tied] About methodology...

Glen: I don't recall scientists thinking of things in terms of both waves and particles AT THE SAME TIME - that would _really_ make for a tangled bush.

It does. That's what the uncertainty principle is partly about. If you want to treat an electron as if it were ONLY a particle -- to pinpopint one of its parameters -- another parameter becomes less pinpointable. If you insist on looking at linguistic phenomena through this physical metaphor -- yes, there is an analogue of the uncertainty principle caused by this tree/wave dualism. You CAN sketch a family tree, but it's inevitably fuzzy if dialects and languages (also distantly related ones) are allowed to interact.

Glen: In order to reconstruct languages (like IE!!!) we have to impose some order, otherwise nothing can be accomplished. I find it ironic that you talk about this complementary scenario as if this is the foundation of IE yet if this idea were in place before the birth of IE studies, nothing would have arisen as a result and we would find ourselves in the linguistic dark ages. It's crossword puzzle time.

The IE tree also has its problems, as any IEist knows, as does that of any particular branch. Try to draw a family tree of Germanic, Slavic or Romance. Our traditional classifications are pathetic. "South Slavic" is not a valid genetic unit, nor is "East Germanic". German arose from a mixture of rather different dialects which have partly converged but locally retain many of the old differences (the same may be true of IE in general). As for Romance, there are as many classifications as there are classifiers, if not more.

 

We can see the IE family as a something tree-like only because, first, its late Neolithic expansion favoured split-and-divergence processes (and it was only more recently that convergence began to eat away at the differences); secondly, there has been some "weeding out" in the process and a number of tiny branches have disappeared leaving about a dozen "crown clades"; but even so the tree is far from orderly. What sort of entity is Italo-Celtic or Balto-Slavic, for example? Most of the "nodes" in the tree are artifacts of out analytic methods. Don't pretend you don't realise how fuzzy the reconstructable PIE node itself is.

 

Since the time-depths in are modest in the case of IE and other well-visible families, the comparative method yield fairly good results and gives us a fair approximation of the diachronic developments. It's much worse for Nostratic and other large-scale projects involving IE. Ringe finds that only in the case of IE and Finno-Ugric (he didn't use Samoyedic data) do the observed correspondences MARGINALLY rise above the background noise level. For Nostratic (and, incidentally, Finno-Ugric versus the three "core" subfamilies of Altaic) his simulations show that the observed "regularities" are indistinguishable from chance. His methodology has been furiously attacked by Nostraticists, but what else would you expect them to do?

 

Piotr